[alt-photo] Re: Casein, whey, and palak paneer (was Re: I know, another sizing question)

[Tomas Sobota]

Trevor,

you shouldn't be surprised. "casein" comes from Latin "caseus" which is at
the origin of the English word "cheese", the German word "Käse", Spanish
"queso" and so on. Caseus means ... well, cheese.

Whey on the other hand is the serum of the milk. It's composition varies
according to the procedure used to separate it, but you usually find yet
more proteins, some albumin, globulins and such. Nothing to suggest that it
could be used as a sizing agent.

Whey is used in the "serum process" invented by Thomas Sutton in 1855, a
variant of the salted paper process. You can see a description of the
process in "Primitive Photography" by Alan Greene. Greene says that this
process should be used on unsized papers because the lactic acid of the
serum would eat the sizing away anyway. So there you are.

Tom Sobota
Madrid, Spain

On Thu, Sep 9, 2010 at 5:58 PM, Trevor Cunningham
<trevor at chalkjockeys.com>wrote:

>  Fascinating. I was looking back at casein and realized that it matches,
> exactly, my recipe for making paneer cheese...which, as it turns out, is the
> casein. I had been under the very incorrect assumption that the whey was the
> casein. However, with a little digging, I discovered that whey isolate (a
> popular body-building product) has been used as a paper sizing agent for
> food packaging. Could it be possible that the whey resulting from the
> casein-making process could be a potential sizing agent with some tweaking?
> Am I going off the deep end?
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